Yesterday, Lavabit — the email service used by Edward Snowden, catapulting it into unwanted fame — filed a request to have its case partially unsealed, allowing for third parties to file amicus briefs. Today, an appeal filing has surfaced revealing some details about what went down with the email service after attracting the government’s attention, […]
According to Edward Snowden’s cache of documents, the NSA has been delving deeper into India’s servers than many could have imagined. The Hindu is reporting that, in addition to the usual PRISM snooping, the agency also vacuumed up data on the country’s nuclear, political and space programs. The newspaper says it has a document, entitled “A Week in the Life of PRISM reporting,” which allegedly shows that discussions between high-ranking politicians, nuclear and space scientists were being monitored in “real-time.” The revelation comes a few months after Kapil Sibal, India’s IT chief, denied that any such surveillance was being undertaken. Who knows? Maybe he was spending so much time on his other projects that he missed the clues. For its part, the US has insisted that its hands are clean in India. Back in June, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the US doesn’t look at individual conversations but instead “randomly surveys” data in order to discover communications that are “linked to terrorists.”
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Register
Source: The Hindu
Have you attempted to fax your way to full or partial disclosure of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) recently? Well too bad, suckers! Because the Office of the Secretary of Defense has a broken fax machine, and it ain’t getting fixed anytime soon.
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Since the whole PRISM thing blew up, and dozens of other Snowden revelations followed it, there’s been a lot of talk about government spying—foreign stuff and domestic survellience—and what these revelations mean. According to Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, not much; this is just part of our society now.
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You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
By now, it’s no secret that the NSA has courted privacy violations, but new documents divulge just how long such incidents have occurred. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released approximately 1,800 pages of declassified files, which reveal that the NSA’s phone record program violations happened between 2006 (when it first came under court supervision) and 2009, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered changes to the operation. During that period, a total of 17,835 phone numbers were listed for checking against Uncle Sam’s database, and only about 1,800 were based on the standard of reasonable suspicion. According to Clapper, congress received the papers we’re seeing now at the time of the incidents, and corrective measures have been put in place. Among the preventative actions are a complete “end-to-end” review of telephony metadata handling, the creation of the Director of Compliance position and a fourfold increase of the compliance department’s personnel.
As it turns out, the missteps are (again) said to have been accidents. “There was nobody at the NSA who had a full understanding of how the program worked,” an intelligence official claims. Sure, the increased transparency is certainly welcome, but a recently-leaked NSA audit from May of 2012 suggests that collection of protected data is still occurring from a combination of human error and technical limits. To pore through the National Security Agency’s fresh load of documents, hit the second source link below.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Wall Street Journal
Facebook and Yahoo have petitioned the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for permission to reveal how many personal data requests are made by the government, joining Google and Microsoft in taking a stand against secret snooping. The new suits, which join an amended Google transparency petition the search engine filed today, see Facebook and […]
It hasn’t been long since former CIA technical analyst Edward Snowden leaked a cache of top secret documents which alleged that the NSA was obtaining user data from major internet companies. The companies named in those documents included Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, among others. Most of these companies denied knowing about the PRISM program. Its no secret that the U.S. government does make requests for user data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA. The companies aren’t allowed to disclosed what sort of requests have been made under FISA. These three companies have petitioned the government to allow them to reveal FISA requests to their users, so that they can provide more transparency to the users.
Rob Bell, Yahoo’s General Counsel, wrote that withholding information about such requests “breeds mistrust and suspicion — both of the United States and of companies that must comply with government legal directives.” Colin Stretch, Facebook’s General Counsel, wrote in a statement that the company believes there’s more information that the public deserves to know. He also said that the information will help foster an informed debate on whether or not the government backed security programs “adequately balance privacy interests when attempting to keep the public safe.” It remains to be seen if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decides to allow companies to make government data requests public.
Facebook, Google And Yahoo Petition To Reveal FISA Requests original content from Ubergizmo. 
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It’s not every day you see Google, Facebook and Yahoo aligned on a issue, but a push toward increased governmental transparency is just the sort of cause that’ll put competing web companies on the same outraged page. All three noted today through their respective channels that they’ve filed petitions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to disclose the number of requests the government has issued for user data under national security statutes. Says Yahoo general counsel Ron Bell:
We believe that the U.S. Government’s important responsibility to protect public safety can be carried out without precluding Internet companies from sharing the number of national security requests they may receive.
Google is accelerating efforts to toughen its data encryption, the company has revealed, aiming to curtail unofficial snooping on user information in the aftermath of NSA PRISM controversy. “It’s an arms race” Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, told the Washington Post, describing government-mandated hackers as “the most skilled players in this […]
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